Writing the Arab World: Reading to Help Understand the Arab Spring

Marco Werman talks to John Freeman, editor of literary magazine Granta, about writers and writing from the Arab world.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life in Mumbai’s Annawadi Slum

Marco Werman talks with Katherine Boo, author of “Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity”.

Iranian Officials Arrest ‘Funny in Farsi’ Translator

Two weeks ago, Iranian authorities arrested the Iranian scholar Mohammed Soleimani Nia. Nia had translated American works into Persian, including Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing up Iranian in America. The memoir’s author, Firoozeh Dumas, tells host Marco Werman about Nia’s work, and his impact inside Iran.

Is War Going Out of Style?

Anchor Lisa Mullins speaks with Joshua Goldstein of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, about his book “Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide.”

The Fall of Communism in Bulgaria

A new book by Kristen Ghodsee tells the stories of ordinary lives upended by Bulgaria’s move from communism to capitalism in the late 1980s and 90s.

Kids Books for the Holidays

This year’s selection includes new titles that feature stunning artwork, as well as some updated classics.

Great Books for The Holidays

This year’s recommendations come from writers and journalists including Granta editor John Freeman and writer Yiyun Li.

Iconic Paris Bookstore Owner George Whitman Dies

George Whitman, owner and founder of Paris’s Shakespeare and Company bookstore, passed away Thursday.

Reporting from Forgotten Latin America

Gerry Hadden has just published a new book titled “Never The Hope Itself: Love and Ghosts in Latin America and Haiti.”

Soviet Lines Way of Life in Grushin Novel

Award-winning writer, Olga Grushin, has written an entire novel about a defining feature of Russian Soviet life, standing in line. The lines disappeared as Communism dissolved, but their image, and the memory of them, remain. The book is just out in paperback, and reporter Brigid McCarthy tells us about it.

World Books Review: An Authoritative Gathering of Modern Chinese Drama

Minor translation issues aside, “The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Drama”‘s excellent selection, colloquial and stage-friendly translations, and illuminating introduction undoubtedly make the volume the authoritative choice in teaching and reading modern Chinese drama for the foreseeable future.

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World Books Review: Lodgings — A Generous Selection of Verse from an Intriguing Polish Poet

A problematic selection of poems from Andrzej Sosnowski, an impressive contemporary Polish poet whose writing combines antic playfulness and insistent earnestness.

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World Books Review: Adonis’s Selected Poems — A Giant of Arabic Verse

Syrian poet Adonis has has been compared to both Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot in his modernist sensibility and influence — perhaps both in one person makes a better comparison.

World Books Review: The Weekend – A Portrait of German Guilt

In this novel, German writer Bernhard Schlink wants to explore the powerful guilt that the German people still feel after World War II, how they are still rightly disturbed by displays of nationalism and religiosity parading under the banners of truth and justice.

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• Bill Marx’s Arts Fuse magazine

World Books podcast: Peter Filkins

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A few years ago, Peter Filkins, an award-winning translator of German, walked into a bookstore, read a few pages of an obscure German novel and recognized that he had stumbled onto literary gold. ‘The Journey’ was one of the 26 volumes penned by the German Jew H. G. Adler, a Holocaust survivor who sought to memorialize and understand the experience through fiction, poetry, social history, and philosophy. Filkins has now translated another of Adler’s books, entitled ‘Panorama.’
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